The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.

"Richards pieces together each woman's story as artfully as a quilter creates a quilt... Transcendent, endowed with warmth and compassion."-Booklist Three generations of women discover the healing gift of family, memories and love Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother,...

Plantagenet Palliser must face new challenges and a changing world if he is to hold his family together in the final installment of the Palliser Novels. After losing his devoted wife, Glencora, Duke Plantagenet Palliser takes on a task he has never had the time or skills to bother with before: dealing with his children. Palliser has never been a doting father, what with the responsibilities of title and duty constantly beckoning him away, but now...

Since her father died, Katie Raber's mother has tried to keep Katie close at hand, but the young Amish woman wants to break free from her mother's shadow, hoping to gain independence by attending nearby Mennonite youth gatherings.

Young and recently widowed, Jasmine Houston confronts the vital issues of freedom and slavery, love and hate, life and death. As Jasmine's opposition to slavery grows and her friendship with her bachelor brother-in-law Nolan deepens, her Massachusetts horse farm soon becomes a stop for the Underground Railroad. With both her mother and mammy dying, she and her young son rush to the family plantation in Mississippi--escorted by Nolan. Keeping a death-bed...

Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa -- the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack -- and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and...

Born into a Hollywood dynasty, Siena McMahon seems to have a fairy-tale life. Yet behind the gates of the sprawling McMahon mansion, the family is bound together by infighting and ambition. Siena must search the dysfunctional landscape of her life for people who will help her survive and become the person she was meant to be.

When she learns that her younger brother Danny has committed suicide, Sayre Lynch relents from her vow never to return to Destiny, the small Louisiana town in which she grew up. She plans to leave immediately after the funeral, but instread soon finds herself drawn into the web cast by Huff Hoyle, her controlling and tyrannical father, the man who owns the town's sole industry, an iron foundry, and in effect runs the lives of everyone who lives there....

Sharing a family life in the 1930s near the legendary Palisades Amusement Park, a family of dreamers explores ambitions and cultural boundaries that are challenged by the realities of the Great Depression, multiple wars, and the park's eventual closing in 1971.